Do it yourself – Build your own mobile cam holder

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In the last couple of months my colleagues and I struggled with mobile presentations. We had always two situations/ problems. Either we showed our apps during the sprint review meeting just to the client on the real device and all others could not see what we were presenting. Or we were fighting with HDMI/ VGA cables to connect the device to the projector, but we never get the perfect setup up and runing, so that everyone in the meeting was happy. So we thought about a mobile cam holder for the presentations, where the app is presented on the real device. The installed web cam should be connected to a laptop and the interactions from the device are visible on the projector.

The whole team agreed, that we need such a cam holder. We checked the internet for cam holders to buy, but the solutions we found are really expensive and not what we wanted. So the next logical step was to build our own cam holder.

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BrokeYourApp

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Thanks to my former colleague @the_qa_guy, I now know the website http://brokeyourapp.com/. The website is presenting nasty bugs in iOS mobile apps.
BrokeYourAppThe team behind the page is checking and testing random apps from the iOS store and is trying to break them. If they broke the app, they write a bug report with detailed steps, screenshots and videos. The whole report will be send to the developer. The bugs are categorized into

  • Crash
  • Freeze
  • UI Glitch
  • Dead End
  • Vanish

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ExtSolo Library – to extend your Robotium test automation

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Today, I found a really nice library extension for Robotium. The name of the library is ExtSolo and stands for Extension Solo. The name stands for itself, it extends the known solo object provided by Robotium.
The library is developed by the guys from bitbar, the company behind testdroid.

If you check the provided API documentation, you find some really useful methods to integrate them into your Android test automation framework. There are methods like:

  • changeDeviceLanguage(java.util.Locale locale)
  • fail(java.lang.String name, java.lang.Object e)
  • setGPSMockLocation(double latitude, double longitude, double altitude)
  • turnWifi(boolean enabled)

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CMAP© Certified Mobile App Professional

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The International Software Quality Institute (iSQI) announced a new certification for mobile app professionals – CMAP© Mobile App Testing – Foundation Level.

The first three pilot courses will take place in February and March in UK and Germany. After the pilot courses, there are already some providers offering the
training to get certified.

CMAP_Pilot Courses(Source: https://www.isqi.org/tl_files/data/images/SIG/CMAP_Pilot%20Courses%20.png)

The syllabus contains the following topics:

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Mobile Page Objects with Robotium-Sandwich

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In several blog posts I wrote about the Android test automation framework Robotium. Those articles described the setup of the tool and how to split the whole test suite into smaller parts. Splitting the test suite into smaller parts is sometimes neccessary because building huge test suites can be a real challenge. If you don’t think about the architecture and about an abstraction layer of your test suite, the code will be impossible to mantain, impossible to scale and at the end, you will end up in a nightmare.

The guys from appThwack developed a library called ‘Robotium-Sandwich’ which is built on top of the Android instrumentation and the Robotium framework to solve the problem of unmaintainable test suites. The idea behind Robotium-Sandwich is similar to the page objects from Selenium 2.

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